Statistics is used to predict the future. Terrorism wasn't a factor 40 years ago...so that has to be taken into account. A model is a model - it's neither false nor true. It is as accurate as the assumptions built into that model. You can dispute the assumptions, but not the model is accurate. As for personal attacks - are you serious - all you do is fire personal attacks....look at your previous post, it opens with: Now, it's a free board, and you can attack attack attack all you want, but then stop whining when I stop responding to your posts ok?
I think everyone knows my background at this stage. So there's no point in beating that dead horse. I do not see how that connects to the "better safe then sorry" line though.
Again looking at the probabilities it is doubtful that it will happen on any flight that you are on. It is the same as saying that because an auto accident will definitely happen again and it has happened before then it is rational to jerk the wheel and go into emergency driving procedures at the first sign of tail lights. After all those often precede rear end accidents. That isn't rational, nor is even driving in fear of an accident because there will definitely be more traffic accidents. Because there is the chance of an accident but not the probability doesn't mean we should stop safe driving procedures. It means we should drive carefully and safely, but we don't have to be afraid of it happening everytime we step behind the wheel. It doesn't have to be any particular race. If someone is parking moving vans in front of federal buildings it might be a good idea to keep an eye on that. It would be racist to say that because that guy is white therefore we should be more afraid of him blowing up a building. I disagree that it would be more effective at stopping men from the middle east at blowing up a plane. The men from the middle east would just use someone else. We've already had an example of a blonde headed female used to cart explosives by Palestinian terrorists because they knew she didn't fit the profile. The girl didn't even know she had them. Her boyfriend had placed them in her backpack. They tried racial profiling to stop drug smuggling, and the smugglers stopped using latino men, so they had to broaden the random searches. The fact is that if you are more suspicious of people from one place there is a greater chance someone else will get through. Richard Reid is a prime example. Luckily someone wasn't just suspicious of middle eastern men, and Reid was stopped. If you are looking for one type of bomber it is far too easy to use a different type. If you are looking for anyone and everyone then they can't elude that. If you say certain individuals of a race are dangerous that isn't racist. If you say anyone of that race is more likely to be dangerous because certain individuals of that race are dangerous then it is racism. My argument does meet the definition of racism because it is a negative stereotype applied to an individual based on his ethnicity it certainly is racism. Anytime you apply a negative attribute of certain individuals to the entirety of that race it is racism.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong again, in your first 3 sentenses. Please re-read your own post, and read mine again. Statistics CAN be used as a reference to have a BETTER GUESS about the future, unlike you claimed to predit future. Besides, your original claim was that we CANNOT predict what it will be in next 80 years, therefore you thought just saying every 20 years is a fair model. I explained to you why a comparable sample size is necessary when you compare 2 probabilities. I also explained to you why to say something only happened once in the past 100 years, should happen every 20 years, is NOT fair model, NOR an accurate model. Terrorism is about assasination and indistinguishing killing or even intentional killing of civilians to insert fear into people's minds. It's been recorded since human history, which is much much longer than 40 years as you claimed. Remember the war crimes we talked about a little while ago? That's terrorism as well, as Japanese war criminals admitted to insert fear by indistinguishing killing. You claimed all the time about all the attacks I had on you. I asked n+1 times for you to quote me. And you whinned about I criticizing your lacking of logic? It's my honest opinion based on my observation, which was proven three times in a row in this very thread already. When did I EVER whine about your reponding/or not reponding to me? For the n+2th time, maybe I can get a direct quote?
No, it just doesn't FB. I'm sorry but it doesn't meet the definition. You are not saying someone is a terrorist because they are middle eastern. Yes, if you said all men from the middle east are terrorists that might be racism (if middle eastern was a race). If you say 'I am aware that men from the middle east are more likely to be a terrorist threat than a grandma from wisconsin,' that is not racist. It is a fact. A fact cannot be irrational by definition. If black panthers announced in the media that they were going to start blowing up bus stations, is it racist for the people to be on the lookout for suspicious acting black men at bus stations? No, of course it isn't. That's just silly. As for effectiveness etc: your Palestinian example doesn't work. You can't put a bomb in their backpack without them knowing and then have them unknowingly detonate it. You can't have someone unknowingly hijack a plane. They MIGHT have someone not middle eastern act but so far they haven't been able to do that. The Drug example work for the simple reason that most people won't take money to blow themselves up, where they might take money to transport drugs.
Here's an interesting article on the subject: THECIPREPORT AUGUST 2003 / VOLUME 2, NUMBER 2 —7— The Future of Racial Profiling in the War on Terrorism by Nelson Lund Before 9/11, we had what looked like a clear national consensus against racial profiling in law enforcement. Although the issue had become controversial, the disputes were almost entirely concerned with whether the police were in fact commonly using forbidden racial stereotypes, especially when choosing which motorists to pull over for traffic violations that are so common that officers necessarily ignore them most of the time. Then came the terrorist attacks. All of the hijackers who carried out the hijackings were Middle Eastern men, and commentators began arguing that racial profiling is an appropriate tool in the war on terrorism. Judge Robert Bork, for example, has neatly distinguished ordinary law enforcement from the new threat we face: "The stigma attached to profiling where it hardly exists has perversely carried over to an area where it should exist but does not: the war against terrorism." 1 The public seems to agree. Polls have showed strong majorities in favor of subjecting those of Arab descent to extra scrutiny at airports. Interestingly, blacks and Arab-Americans were even more likely than whites to favor such policies.2 The Bush Administration at first resisted the pressure to employ racial profiling.3 The Department of Justice, however, has now reversed course and adopted Judge Bork's distinction between ordinary police work and anti-terrorism activities. In June, the Department's Civil Rights Division promulgated a new directive entitled "Guidance Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies." This document adopts two standards, one for "traditional law enforcement activities," and a very different one for certain other police activities. The first standard is faithful to President Bush's pre-9/11 statement that racial profiling is "wrong and we will end it in America." Federal agencies are forbidden to consider race4 in any "traditional" law enforcement decision, except where officials have trustworthy information linking someone of a specific race to a specific crime, as for example where a credible eyewitness has described a fleeing felon as a member of a particular race, or where a criminal organization is known to comprise members who are overwhelmingly of a given race. Because these exceptions do not entail racial profiling or stereotyping, the Justice department has effectively imposed a total ban on that practice in traditional law enforcement activities. A completely different standard is now applicable to federal activities involving threats to "national security or other catastrophic events (including the performance of duties related to air transportation security) or in enforcing laws protecting the integrity of the Nation's borders." According to the new Justice Department guidance, racial profiling may be used in these contexts whenever it is permitted by the Constitution. This is very close to giving federal officials carte blanche to select targets for investigation or especially intensive attention on the basis of racial stereotypes. The applicable constitutional test is called "strict scrutiny." As the Justice Department acknowledges, applying this test is "a fact-intensive process." That is just another way of saying that there is no clearly defined constitutional line between permissible and impermissible uses of racial profiling. And because the Justice Department makes no effort to draw a line between what it regards as permissible and impermissible, security officials are effectively encouraged to err in the direction of using racial stereotypes whenever they might seem useful. The only examples of forbidden behavior offered by the Justice Department are two very extreme cases. First, the Department rules out using racial criteria "as a mere pretext for invidious discrimination." This is something that nobody would ever admit to doing. Second, the Department says that a screener may not pick someone out for heightened scrutiny at a checkpoint "solely" because of his race "n the absence of any threat warning." This situation cannot even arise, given that the whole nation is under a constant and continuing "threat warning" that is likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future; thus, the principal implication here is that screeners may indeed focus on individuals "solely" because of their race so long as any threat warning remains in place. In addition to being inherently "fact intensive," the constitutional test will almost certainly be applied by the courts in a way that is extremely deferential to the discretionary judgments of federal officials. The leading case, Korematsu v. United States, upheld the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, even though the internment program was based entirely on a generalized and unsubstantiated mistrust of Japanese-Americans. Although this decision has frequently been criticized, it has not been overruled. Similarly, the Supreme Court has held that law enforcement decisions based on racial stereotypes do not violate the Fourth Amendment.5 And, in its most recent decision on racial discrimination, the Court gave extreme deference to the discretionary judgments of government officials who used a form of racial profiling in admissions decisions to a state law school.6 Because the government interests at stake in this affirmative action case were clearly much less urgent than those involved in preventing terrorist attacks, one must infer that the Court has implicitly dictated a virtual handsoff policy with respect to judicial supervision of racial profiling in this context. The Justice Department's guidance document, which encourages federal agencies involved in anti-terrorism and related activities to employ racial profiling to the full extent permitted by the Constitution, has several serious imperfections, including the following: First, law enforcement officials now have an incentive to bring ordinary law enforcement activities under the rubric of "national security or other catastrophic events" in order to escape the very strict rules imposed by the Department for traditional law enforcement. If an agent at the DEA decides that the escape of a particular drug trafficker would be "catastrophic," the Justice Department's guidance does not clearly prohibit him from using racial stereotypes in his investigation. The same goes for many other activities that Congress has thought so threatening that they deserve to be made federal crimes. Whether or not this bleeding of the categories occurs on a significant scale, the unbridled use of racial profiling as a tool in the war on terrorism and other "catastrophic events" could significantly undermine the unfulfilled national commitment to making citizens of all races equal under the law. Few events could have been more catastrophic than losing World War II, yet almost everyone now recognizes that massive racial profiling, albeit lawful, was a completely inappropriate and unnecessary means of preventing that catastrophe. Finally, the Justice Department has neglected one of the most obvious and well-known pathologies of government bureaucracies. The new policy imposes virtually no controls on the use of racial stereotypes in an indeterminately large class of activities. This will encourage government officials to employ racial stereotypes, and it may foster the lazy use of such stereotypes. The actual effect could well be to impede the war on terrorism. We have a recent example of this danger: the investigation (in which the Department of Justice participated) of the terroristic sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area in late 2002. apparently relying on well-publicized "criminal profiles," according to which random snipers are almost always white males, the police focused their attention on suspects fitting this stereotype. Duly shocked to find that the investigation had been based on a false premise, the Washington police chief memorably remarked: "We were looking for a white van with white people, and we ended up with a blue car with black people."7 Not the least of the shortcomings in the Justice Department's new policy guidance is that it makes no effort at all to erect safeguards against repetitions of this sort of dysfunctional bureaucratic behavior. 1Robert H. Bork, Civil Liberties After 9/11, Commentary, July-Aug. 2003, at 30. 2Milton Heumann & Lance Cassak, Afterword: September 11th and Racial Profiling, 54 Rutgers Law Review 283, 286-87 (2001); Jason L. Riley, 'Racial Profiling' and Terrorism, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 24, 2001, at A22. 3See, e.g., Michael Chertoff, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, Testimony Before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Preserving Freedoms While Defending Against Terrorism, Federal News Service, Nov. 28, 2001 [available at LEXIS, News Library, News Group File, A11]. 4Here, and throughout, I use "race" as a shorthand for "race or ethnicity." 5Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996). 6Grutter v. Bollinger, 123 S. Ct. 2325 (2003). 7Craig Whitlock & Josh White, Police Checked Suspect's Plates At Least 10 Times, Washington Post, Oct. 26, 2002, at A1. For further detail, see Nelson Lund, The Conservative Case against Racial Profiling in the War on Terrorism, 66 Albany Law Review 329 (2003). http://mason.gmu.edu/~nlund/Pubs/CIPRacialProfiling.pdf
The bomb was to be delivered not detonated. It was a true incident. They will get non-middle eastern people to act. They have gotten at least one to try it, and he was stopped. They could also attempt to smuggle a timed device on board with someone who didn't know they were carrying it, etc. They can get around it no problem. It is far more effective to carry out random searches. If a terrorist knows that no matter who or what they have carrying on explosives or weapons or whatever there is definitely a chance that person will be stopped, they won't know how to get around it, or how to lesson the chances of getting caught.
There is a significant difference between putting something in someone's backpack crossing into Israel and someone going through airport security. I don't think you're going to see this happen. To ensure control and the most likelihood of success they'll still have to use their own operatives. They're going to have a lot harder time finding someone outside their own nutcase sphere to blow themselves up. Since its unlikely they'll be searched out of the millions of passengers that fly in a day, it won't matter if they use the same probability guidelines you and SC have adopted! OTOH if there is profiling...
If there is racial profiling they know exactly what it is they have to avoid and will plan accordingly. To assume otherwise isn't given the terrorists enough credit. They've shown they are capable of quite elaborate and complex plans. If anyone can be searched that is one more obstacle they have to go through.
Thanks for the read, Hayes. I'm wondering that, given the current political climate, one side will claim judicial activism to court rulings that strike down the Constitutionality of some profiling methods. I also wonder whether that side will claim we're losing the war on terror because of these court decisions (while ignoring other upheld rulings). There's a lot of head scratching with the Moussaui ruling and whether the convictions based on the laws Congress passed can withstand the test of time. Although Moussaui wasn't caught through racial profiling. I think many aspects of it bleed with future arrests through profiling. Can his case be considered an example with "catastrophic" implications?
Probably. Interesting question. They aren't mutually exclusive. You can do both. However, I will say that this has strayed somewhat from my original point which is that it isn't irrational to have a fear that middle eastern terrorists may blow up your plane. I am against racial profiling like 'most drug dealers are black so police should pull over blacks to see if they have drugs in the car.' I am not entirely comfortable with racial profiling and this is one of those areas where I've previously alluded that with the issue of terrorism I am not sure where to draw the line.
Listen guy, I'm not going to go through all the Chinese threads posted a while back where you kept on badgering for an answer on one hand and telling me that I'm not capable of logical thinking and must be an ignoramous with the other. I'm not interested in arguing about it. Don't berate me and expect a response ok? Why in earth are we arguing about statistics? Who cares? The point was to demonstrate that you COULD argue that one is more likely to die from a terrorist strike then a lightning one. So you can disagree if you want ok? But please, I don't want to argue with you about your knowledge of stat 101 - I really don't give a damn.
Oops, I might have accidently hurt some fragile feelings. I am sorry about that. Don't respond to me. But keep in mind, if you continue to accuse me of attacking, I will continue to ask you to back yourself up. Fair enough? However, I am a simple man of simple logic, if I see something defies logic and facts, if I see some pseudo statistics or science presented, my consciousness makes me call that out. Put me on your ignore list, so that you don't need to worry about my honest observation. BTW, I do NOT expect a response.
So just because you have been outed I shouldn't try to respect your desire for anonymity? You presented that statement and argued for it. Are you saying that you don't stand behind it? If your statements aren't worth anything what is the point of making them?
Hayes again you raise good points and I think we're not that far apart in our thinking on the matter. I don't have time to respond to all of your points but wanted to respond to this. Anyone who has done cost benefit analysis know that probability is very important. While you are right that other factors like the horrificness of the potential situation but any rational consideration of potential outcomes has to heavily weigh the probabilities. When a very unlikely probability drives behavior and fear that is considered paranoia or hysteria and from what I've read of this particular case it strikes me as hysteria. Again for New Yorker's point regarding to jumping to conclusions yes that is a conclusion without all of the evidence but we've yet to see any information that would support a conclusion that there was a legitimate threat and the facts of the case don't bear that out. So yes I think we can all agree that we need to be vigilant regarding terrorism but at the same time that shouldn't justify aggressive or threatening behavior by passengers acting out of overinflated sense of threat.
Actually they have. On some of the latest AL Qaeda videos the spokesperson is a white American. Some of the people arrested for the attempted missile strikes on Israeli airliners where black Africans and if we accept the government's argument that Jose Padilla colluded with Al Qaeda then there is an American Hispanic.
